I’m Robby, and I’m a non-native English speaker. Throughout my entire life I’ve always wanted to speak in English fluently, but because of the way English is taught in schools, I always struggled with my spoken English.

Then, one fine day, after years of constant pursuit of English fluency, I realized the key aspect of spoken English improvement – learning English phrases and word combinations instead of studying grammar rules and trying to construct sentences in your head from scratch!

If you’re interested in improving your English fluency too, please check out the English Harmony System which is a product I created to help all my fellow foreigners to better their spoken English and achieve so much more in professional, social and personal life.

In today’s video I’m going to provide you with a very vivid example of why learning word groups and phrases as opposed to learning individual words is very important.

As a matter of fact, it’s of the utmost importance if you’re really serious about your English fluency. And fluency in any other language for that matter – in case you’re learning some other language on top of English.

So what happened to me last week was the following. My daughter, she’s participating in a German student exchange program, so basically my daughter is learning the German language and she went to Germany a few months ago and now the German partner who happens to be learning the English language came over to us, right? And she lived with us for a week.

And so what happened is that I have studied some German in the past. To be more specific – it was seven years and it’s a long time. In theory I should be able to speak fluent German but as you may know the traditional way of learning languages doesn’t necessarily facilitate your ability to speak. And needless to say, after all these years I’ve also lost all the ability to understand and write and read in German. So basically there’s just a few words that I recognize nowadays.

But the funny thing is that when that girl was living with us, I was trying to kind of remember a few German words and then one after another some random words started popping up in my mind, right? But the thing is, I didn’t know how to use them. I was – suddenly had this realization of what a particular thing is called in German but I wouldn’t be able to string a sentence together. Whereas those few, relatively few phrases – German phrases that is – that I learned all those years ago, I could just speak them out loud without any thinking whatsoever!

And you may want tocheck out this article and there’s video as well and you will be able to perform a test whereby you will learn why contextual learning is paramount if you’re anything serious about your fluency. And you’ll also learn how exactly it works.

And that’s by the way how the English Harmony System works as well. You are basically taught various phrases, sentences and then you’re required to participate in dialogues and you develop the ability to speak without much thinking.

And another example of the effectiveness of learning entire sentences and phrases can be observed whenever I’m trying to remember some Romanian, right, that I learned a few years ago. Well, 12 years ago – whether that constitutes a few or not, I’ll let you be the judge of it, right? But the fact is, I was learning conversational Romanian.

Basically there were no books, there was no traditional methodology involved, I was purely picking up some Romanian as I was working together with some Romanian fellas, right? And the thing is my friends, I can still remember all those phrases after all these years even though I haven’t been using any Romanian, right? I still remember those phrases and they just come all to my mouth without much thinking.

So there you go. That’s a take-homelesson for you today my friends. And thanks for watching!

Please like this video if you enjoyed and found useful what I was saying. And obviously if you have any questions or comments of any nature – well it has to do something with the English language obviously and fluency improvement in general, right?

But basically if you have any questions, you are welcome to publish them in the comment section below.

Alright, thanks for watching my friends and chat to you soon, bye-bye!

Robby

P.S. Would you like to find out why I’m highlighting some of the text in red?Read this article and you’ll learn why it’s so important to learn idiomatic expressions and how it will help you to improve your spoken English!

You can, as a matter of fact, say “on a bus” – and once again, it all depends on the context.

When speaking in general terms, one should say “by bus”, for example – “Normally I go to work by bus”.

There are situations, however, when you may want to say “on a bus” such as to STRESS the very fact that you want to choose the bus as a means of transportation: “Hey guys, we’ll go to the party on a bus, the cab is really not an option!”

Cheers,

Robby

Sergio

By bus, my frend. not on nor in

Sunny

Hey Guru, Please help me out with this- Lets all go on a bus /in a bus/by a bus. Which one is correct grammatically?